“Marriage is lonelier than solitude.”

            Adrienne Rich, “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff” 

There was a moment I’m sure,

Though I no longer know when it was,

Preferring to pretend I never saw it,

When your eyes looked me back

To what I was, and what you were,

And not what either of us would have had us be.

Another when you looked at me

And thought to speak . . . but did not,

And in your silence was something

So clearly profound and prophetic 

That I heard the awful truth of all

That you no longer had the words or need to say.

I remember when you no longer

Opened to my touch . . . and so, not I

To yours . . . and there was in that the

Unspoken commitment to a new embrace

Of space and silence and separation . . .

The disillusionment deep in necessary distance.

In the end there was only our ending,

So many years and slow hard steps

Only to return to the separate places

We started from, but without the dreams.

And in the end, and long ending before,

It’s not you that I miss, but the sweet, sad desiring.